Bento Lab

Amazing to see the range of topics and techniques covered during the PSPxPHBio Training Course 2026: Molecular Detection of Pathogens for Public Health Research, at UP Diliman!

Sampling, DNA extraction, PCR analysis, and data management; working with snail-borne parasites, pathogens, STIs, and water samples; and PCR, eDNA and qPCR....

And we love the photos of trainees in action on their compact PCR table: one of the great things about portable PCR equipment like Bento Lab is how easy it is to set up a temporary lab space anywhere!

For anyone considering portable metagenomics from water samples, here’s a very exciting preprint by Bian et al. (2025) that used Bento Lab and Oxford Nanopore MinION for quantitative metagenomics:

⭐ Five portable and four laboratory DNA extraction protocols compared
⭐ High-molecular-weight DNA recovery
⭐ A barcoded spike-in-based calibration approach for quantification

The authors’ optimal workflow:

🧬 Used Bento Lab, a hand-held bead-beater, and the DNeasy PowerWater Kit
🧬 Was as effective as their laboratory-based methods for on-site DNA recovery
🧬 Produced species-level identification and absolute quantitative results comparable to digital PCR

🔗 Read their preprint here:

www.biorxiv.org

Interested in how portable sequencing could help transform patient care in remote and resource-limited hospitals?

In this case report from Tanzania, the authors describe a completely mobile workflow (involving Bento Lab + Oxford Nanopore MinION sequencing) that helped to diagnose a serious infection in a child when routine diagnostics fell short.

The article shares:

🧬 A fully field-deployable workflow from DNA extraction to bioinformatics
🧬 How Campylobacter jejuni was identified in a single day, guiding effective treatment
🧬 Evidence that portable sequencing can fill diagnostic gaps in hospitals with minimal lab capacity

🔗 Read more here:

Nanopore sequencing technology for clinical diagnosis of infectious diseases where laboratory capacity is meager: A case report In resource-limited settings, patients are often first presented to clinical settings when seriously ill and access to proper clinical microbial diagnostics is often very limited or non-existing. On February 16th, 2022 we were on a field trip to test a completely field-deployable metagenomics sequen...